It was more the textures, rather than the poly count, I feel looked a little flat - it looks like Nick had to work hard to add some highlights..but maybe the real F-16 has very matte paint. I also wonder if 'Aircraft self shadows' are turned off, which perhaps doesn't help.

Some of the paints I've seen are more weathered. There's a ton of liveries with it, and the bump maps are quite good when the light is right.

I have to say the autogen in your last series of images looks awesome. GenX with full autogen would be better than FTX I would have to think. Swiss Pro is about the closest thing to photo scenery with full autogen, but its only 2m. Hopefully that will be out in a few weeks.

How big do your autogen files total? I can probably make available 50MB of FTP space, so I could give you the password and you could upload the agn files, that way everybody here can grab them without the need to send out CD's.